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From HaskellWiki

Internet Relay Chat is a worldwide text chat service with many thousands
of users among various irc networks.

The Freenode IRC network hosts the very large #haskell channel, and we've had
up to 1046
concurrent users, making the channel consistently
one of the most popular
of the thousands of channels on freenode. One famous
resident is Lambdabot, another is hpaste (see
the Bots section below).

The IRC channel can be an excellent place to learn more about Haskell,
and to just keep in the loop on new things in the Haskell world. Many
new developments in the Haskell world first appear on the irc channel.

Since 2009, the Haskell channel has grown large enough that we've split it in two parts:

#haskell, for all the usual things

#haskell-in-depth , for those seeking in depth, or more theoretical discussion

Tip, if you're using Emacs to edit your Haskell sources then why not use it to chat about Haskell? Check out ERC, The Emacs IRC client. Invoke it like this and follow the commands:

M-x erc-select
...
/join #haskell

A screenshot of an irssi session in #haskell

2 Principles

The #haskell channel is a very friendly, welcoming place to hang out,
teach and learn. The goal of #haskell is to encourage learning and
discussion of Haskell, functional programming, and programming in
general. As part of this we welcome newbies, and encourage teaching of
the language.

Part of the #haskell success comes from the fact that the community
is quite tight knit — we know each other — it's not just a homework
channel. As a result, many collaborative projects have arisen between
Haskell irc channel citizens.

Helpful answers should be encouraged with name++ karma points, in public, as a reward for providing a good answer.

Avoid getting frustrated by negative comments and ambiguous questions. Approach them by asking for details (i.e. Socratic questioning), rather than challenging the competence of the writer (ad hominem). As the channel grows, we see a diverse range of people with different programming backgrounds getting accustomed to Haskell. Be patient and take satisfaction from spreading knowledge.

3 History

The #haskell channel appeared in the late 90s, and really got going
in early 2001, with the help of Shae Erisson (aka shapr).

4 Related channels

In addition to the main Haskell channel there are also:

4.1 Language/Country specific

The Freenode staff have asked us to consolidate language channels into the "#haskell-" namespace rather than have them continue on in the "#haskell." namespace. Eventually the language channels below listed with "#haskell." will have to move.

Channel

Purpose

#haskell-br

Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) speakers

#haskell.cz

Czech speakers (UTF-8)

#haskell.de

German speakers

#haskell.dut

Dutch speakers

#haskell.es

Spanish speakers

#haskell.fi

Finnish speakers

#haskell-fr

French speakers (note the hyphen! in the channel name)

#haskell.hr

Croatian speakers

#haskell-id

Indonesian speakers (note the hyphen! in the channel name)

#haskell-it

Italian speakers (note the hyphen! in the channel name)

#haskell.jp

Japanese speakers

#haskell.scandinavian

Scandinavian speakers

#haskell-kr

Korean speakers

#haskell.no

Norwegian speakers

#haskell.pt

Portuguese speakers

#haskell-pl

Polish speakers

#haskell.ru

Russian speakers. Seems that most of them migrated to Jabber conference (haskell@conference.jabber.ru).

#haskell_ru

Russian speakers again, in UTF-8. For those, who prefer good ol' IRC channel with a lambdabot.

5 Logs

6 Bots

There are various bots on the channel. Their names and usage are described here.

6.1 lambdabot

Lambdabot is both the name of a software package and a bot on the channel. It provides many useful services for visitors to the IRC channel. It is available as a haskell package and can be integrated into ghci. Details on the software are found on a separate wiki page.

Here is its interface for the IRC user:

lambdabot's commands are prepended by a '@' sign.

Command

Usage

@help

display help to other commands, but help text is not available for all commands.